Location
San Diego, California
Presentation Date
29 May 2010, 11:20 am - 11:35 am
Abstract
In the night of Apr 6 2009, a Mw 6.3 earthquake struck the Abruzzi region and the whole Central Italy, causing about 300 deaths and vast destructions in the town of L'Aquila, one of the largest urban centres in Central Italy, and its surroundings. As most destructive earthquakes in the Italian Central and Southern Apennines mountain chain, this was caused by a normal fault rupture, the epicenter of which was estimated at less than 5 km from the center of L'Aquila. Several 3-components digital strong motion instruments were installed around L'Aquila at few km distance from the epicenter: 3 of them recorded the earthquake along a transept crossing the Aterno river valley, while two of them are located in the town centre. The near-fault conditions, the complex geological setting – L'Aquila lies on a fluvial terrace, consisting of calcareous breccias and conglomerates, lying on the top of lacustrine silty sediments – and the availability of several very good quality near-fault records, make this earthquake an important benchmark that provided an impressive and instructive picture of strong ground motion in the epicentral region of a normal fault earthquake. This paper illustrates some of the most interesting features of the L'Aquila earthquake near-fault dataset, including (i) peak values and spectral ordinates, together with their relationship with respect to some of the most up-to-date ground motion prediction equations, (ii) long period components, (iii) vertical vs horizontal ground motion. Finally, since the L'Aquila shallow subsoil is characterized by frequent natural buried cavities of karst origin, we briefly investigate their potential role on the seismic response.
Department(s)
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Meeting Name
5th International Conference on Recent Advances in Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering and Soil Dynamics
Publisher
Missouri University of Science and Technology
Document Version
Final Version
Rights
© 2010 Missouri University of Science and Technology, All rights reserved.
Creative Commons Licensing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
File Type
text
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Paolucci, Roberto and Smerzini, Chiara, "Strong Ground Motion in the Epicentral Region of the Mw 6.3, Apr 6 2009, L’Aquila Earthquake, Italy" (2010). International Conferences on Recent Advances in Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering and Soil Dynamics. 4.
https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/icrageesd/05icrageesd/session13/4
Included in
Strong Ground Motion in the Epicentral Region of the Mw 6.3, Apr 6 2009, L’Aquila Earthquake, Italy
San Diego, California
In the night of Apr 6 2009, a Mw 6.3 earthquake struck the Abruzzi region and the whole Central Italy, causing about 300 deaths and vast destructions in the town of L'Aquila, one of the largest urban centres in Central Italy, and its surroundings. As most destructive earthquakes in the Italian Central and Southern Apennines mountain chain, this was caused by a normal fault rupture, the epicenter of which was estimated at less than 5 km from the center of L'Aquila. Several 3-components digital strong motion instruments were installed around L'Aquila at few km distance from the epicenter: 3 of them recorded the earthquake along a transept crossing the Aterno river valley, while two of them are located in the town centre. The near-fault conditions, the complex geological setting – L'Aquila lies on a fluvial terrace, consisting of calcareous breccias and conglomerates, lying on the top of lacustrine silty sediments – and the availability of several very good quality near-fault records, make this earthquake an important benchmark that provided an impressive and instructive picture of strong ground motion in the epicentral region of a normal fault earthquake. This paper illustrates some of the most interesting features of the L'Aquila earthquake near-fault dataset, including (i) peak values and spectral ordinates, together with their relationship with respect to some of the most up-to-date ground motion prediction equations, (ii) long period components, (iii) vertical vs horizontal ground motion. Finally, since the L'Aquila shallow subsoil is characterized by frequent natural buried cavities of karst origin, we briefly investigate their potential role on the seismic response.
